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IZA Discussion Paper No. 9323
September 2015
Pacts for Employment and Competitiveness as a Role Model? Their Effects on Firm Performance

revised version published as 'Contract Innovation in Germany: An Economic Evaluation of Pacts for Competitiveness' in: British Journal of Industrial Relations, 2017, 55(3), 500-526.

Pacts for employment and competitiveness are an integral component of the ongoing process of decentralization of collective bargaining in Germany, a phenomenon that has been hailed as key to that nation's economic resurgence. Yet little is known about the effects of pacts on firm performance. The evidence largely pertains to employment and is decidedly mixed. The present paper investigates the association between pacts and a wider set of outcomes – wages, employment, investment, productivity, innovation, and survivability – in a RDD framework where the controls comprise establishments that negotiated over pacts but failed to reach agreement on their implementation. An extensive set of simulations are run to test for robustness of the key findings of the model. There is no evidence of pacts negatively impacting any of the selected measures of establishment performance. Indeed, the positive effects reported for wages, productivity, and innovation are sustained in simulations.

Communications
Mark Fallak
mark.fallak@liser.lu
+352 585-855-526
World of Labour
Olga Nottmeyer
olga.nottmeyer@liser.lu
+352 585-855-501
Network Coordination
Christina Gathmann
christina.gathmann@liser.lu

The IZA@LISER Network is a global community of scholars dedicated to excellence in labor economics and related fields, now coordinated at the Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER) following its transition from Bonn.

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